This is not to say that Dragon Age shies away from tough predicaments. While you can affect some decisions with the respective skill (like manipulating conversations by persuading or intimidating characters), Dragon Age frequently presents you with options that can radically change events -- opening up separate side quests while closing others off. Certain choices have longer-lasting impacts on the world, and some can even alter the overall story. For example, can you convince people to protect a town under siege that they would rather abandon, particularly if it they could lose their lives in the process? Even the smallest decision can have a butterfly effect on the game (particularly if someone dies), which is both daunting and exhilarating at the same time.

On top of this, your decisions influence the relationships you have with your party members, improving or damaging their opinion of you significantly. Managing this balance is very important for a number of reasons. First, as a party member's opinion of you improves, you unlock permanent stat bonuses for that character, strengthening their role in your group. Second, the more a party member trusts you, the more they'll open up, providing side quests that strengthen your friendship and allow them to teach their individual skills to other characters in your group and unlock specializations for everyone. Third, depending on the character and the strength of your bond, you can have a romantic relationship with them. On the other hand, make decisions that they don't agree with or completely upset them, and they could choose to leave your group entirely.

Time to die, fiend!

While it's fine to include a variety of relationships, the depiction of love feels rather wooden and romantic segments are censored to the point of being very awkward. But the far bigger problem is that you can essentially buy your party's affection with gifts, even if you've wronged them. It would seem more appropriate to have them refuse to go on missions with you until you complete a side quest to get back in their good graces, or risk them leaving forever. Considering how complex the interaction with your party members can become, that would be the more realistic way of handling relationships, but the current system feels like trite manipulation.

Of course, Dragon Age isn't just about exploration and relationships. There's combat as well. You can engage the enemy in one of three ways: fight in real time, pause the action and tactically determine your next attack, or set up fighting preferences for your characters. While the PC version was particularly suited for tactical combat, the console version was designed around action-based play, with a focus on quick commands and an auto-lock targeting feature. There are two significant issues to be aware of, however. The first thing is that combat can become boring because your characters are more than capable of downing the limited number of enemies that you'll face. Secondly, if you're an RPG veteran, you'll want to bump the difficulty level up to Hard or Nightmare as the standard difficulty is particularly easy.

You can still pause the game and issue commands, but you'll need to keep the left trigger held down to do so, which gets old quickly while trying to micromanage battles. For the most part, the radial menu works well, but there are a limited number of quick command slots. Programming battle preferences is useful, but every now and then the character will disregard your commands and utilize basic actions instead of skills or abilities. Furthermore, even with preferences set up, characters frequently act on their own idiotic accord -- running blindly into traps that they should clearly be able to see and disarm. Combine this with your party's poor path finding skills, and you'll clearly want direct control over everyone.

When you have a well-balanced party of characters working together, you can effectively create combos that can decimate your opponents, like casting a spell to freeze approaching monsters and having your warriors smash the creatures into pieces. Battle within the game is frequently a brutal affair, with spells rocketing towards their intended target and clashing swords bouncing off shields and enemies. Even more striking is the attention paid to kills and critical hits, and watching heads get lopped off, or beasts getting impaled are fantastic touches.

However, I had a couple problems with the battle system. First off, the game doesn't really scale enemies to match your characters' levels, so after a while, some fights are designed to overwhelm your party with size instead of skill. In fact, once you start to approach level 20, many of the Darkspawn are killed in a matter of seconds, drawing out play unnecessarily. Another issue is that everyone, regardless of their distance to a fight, looks like they walked through a slaughterhouse afterwards. Why is my mage, who's a sizable distance from the fight, covered in red? It seems like some of that blood could've been toned down especially since it takes a while to disappear.

Really, it'll all wash off with soap and water.

While I'd love to say that Dragon Age looks phenomenal, that isn't accurate on the PS3 and Xbox 360. The graphics aren't as crisp as they are on the PC, and character models can be rather hit or miss. General character animations can be a bit stiff, but the battle animations are pretty solid. There is a lot of screen tearing, and I wish that you could maneuver the camera perspective out of its locked position. While I can understand that a locked camera helps keep the focus on the battle and action, it would be useful to get a larger glimpse of the battlefield. Additionally, there are a number of framerate hitches, more so on the PS3 than the 360. It doesn't break gameplay, but with a game that runs for sixty to eighty hours, that starts to add up over time.

An extensive amount of dialogue is included in a m&#Array; lange of accents, some of which are done well while others are poorly performed. At least your party members will provide some moments of hilarity as they question, cajole and annoy each other during down moments of exploration. Your created character will exclaim random phrases every now and then in the midst of battle, but they are, for the most part, a silent observer. That's fine, because the real star here is the music, which sounds like a Hollywood score for a fantasy movie.

The Verdict

Incredibly deep and expansive, Dragon Age: Origins is one of those titles that can easily swallow up dozens of hours of play and keep you coming back for more. The fact that BioWare chose to include downloadable content, including a new character and side quest, on launch day proves that they have an extensive plan for supporting the game. Couple that with the fact that each character can be developed in radically different ways, and you have an adventure that earns its own place among BioWare's expansive RPG collection. While the visuals are a bit underwhelming and the difficulty is a bit easier on the consoles, this is still a great title. This is the kind of adventure that fantasy RPG fans have been hoping that BioWare would deliver &#Array; a game with a ton of re-playability and an incredibly vivid world that is the start of an impressive franchise.

9PresentationA rich and vivid world, loads of mature themes and story expand the tale of Ferelden in front of your eyes. Inconsistent Origin elements and the gift feature weakens believability though.

7.5GraphicsMuddier textures and framerate hitches wind up making the visuals on the console a rough experience. Animations are fine, if a little stiff at times.

8.5SoundVoice acting can be hit or miss, and some effects can go on for too long, but the music and the majority of sound effects are excellent.

8.5GameplayGameplay is definitely action focused, and the radial wheels do a decent job, but the difficulty level is scaled down.

9.5Lasting AppealSet aside a large amount of time for this one – beating the game will frequently make you want to pick up and play again to see just how a decision or a conversation would be different.